Thursday, January 29, 2015

Thanks to a cunning feat of spine-bending graft, my Intray once again resembles an actual tray.

Gone (for now) is any metaphorical nonsense about mountains or Madonna’s tits.

I could drug a rabbit and lay it down in my tray with its ears flopping over the rim — and still have space for a couple of trussed guinea pigs and a hamster in a straitjacket — such is the Innability of my Intray.

If I were dumb enough to post hilarious videos of myself to FaceBook or Tumblr or VoilaLeWankeure, right now, I’d be uploading a full fifteen minutes of my grinning self sporting my completely empty Intray as a badge of honour cum zany beret.

It won’t last, this rare moment of demandlessness, so forgive me while I savour the peace and quiet like a milkophobe tugging a cow’s udder through a mangle.

Any second, the phone could ring.

Any minute, my local tattooist could email me with requests for more abdominal haiku ideas.

Or I myself could give way to brute desire, and concoct from nothing a To Do List.

I am as a blissed-out nun afloat on the foam of all those bar-of-soap jokes!

I am the slap of Buster Crabbe’s sopping Tarzan loincloth against The Rock’s inflated ego of a grin!

So, what are we supposed to do? Choose one? Mix n’ match? Or throw all our hats in the ring and celebrate the lot?

How joyous it would be to leap around with our partners, clad in kangaroo pelt saris, as we took selfies of our peanut brittle muffin smeared lips and popped the fuck out of a monster roll of bubble wrap.

Or maybe we could sport short blonde hair and pour Rogan Josh through a bubble wrap funnel onto the heads of platypi afloat on muffins as a “Jan 26th only” special offer protocol for weddings.

Thursday, January 22, 2015

“What shall we get Whirl for Christmas? I know — what about a pack of speciality coffee? Full of all the coffee flavours he loves, plus that extra taste of Christmas?”

and

“I've thought of the perfect gift for Whirl. You know he loves drinking tea and all? M&S have these special Christmas tea bags — the kind he'll really love.”

and

“You'll never guess what I've just seen online! It'll be perfect for Whirl! Imagine his face on Christmas morning when he opens up a mini-hamper of individually wrapped Christmas cheeses!”

and

“Whirl is in for a fantastic surprise this year. His favourite brewery has put out a speciality Christmas beer, brewed with cinnamon and elf piss. He'll go crazy.”

and

“Who knew you could get freeze-dried reindeer & humbug flavour turkey niblets? Whichever marketing team and zany chef combo dreamt this baby up must have had Whirl in mind for sure. So I've treated him to a thousand packets. In a trunk.”

and

“A Christmas jumper that you can eat? I thought I was going mad when I saw it online — but it's true. It's made of organic soya wool or something, and the idea is that you wear it over Christmas and then eat it prior to New Year. Anchovy flavour didn't sound too festive to me, but I fell in love with the berries. Whirl's gonna love it.”

and

“Mince pies. You can never have too many mince pies at Christmas.”

and

“...so after I ordered the Yule nuts and the spiced fruit puree dispenser, I came across this Christmas ice cream. It was made in Lapland, so it has to be the real deal, and it's kinda like Ben & Jerry's, only with more lumps. Every tub contains a chocolate Santa, two jelly reindeers and a monogrammed sugar snowball. I couldn't argue with all that for £20. Man, that's class. Whirl's always saying he likes the odd Christmassy treat so I snapped it up, just in case everyone else has bought him, like, socks.”

Currently, on My Life As An Immovable 45 Stone Hulk Of Processed Fat And Cinnamon Whose Desire To End It All Is Matched Only By The Urge (As Displayed By Teen Boys Rocking Out On Satyriasis) To Manifest A Boner...

Uhm, yeah — is there an app for this? Some charity that will come and take it all away? Or maybe Santa could have it all back and hand it out next year? To the poor? Or just destroy it with a nuclear flamethrower or something...?

So in the spirit of processed pessimism, here are some tips for ending your own life that will teach all the gloom merchants a thing or two about making overzealous zeal-free proclamations from the moment the autopsy guys take a look at your corpse.

1) Blow all your savings on the most expensive abdominal Sky Travel tattoo you can afford — then blow your brains out live on the net.

2) Submit your Ultimate Calculus Equation to the best mathematics researchers on the planet. Your subsequent leap from the Leaning Tower of Pisa will prove your point sublimely: plummets to doom evidence minimal parabolas.

3) No hangdog expression tops that of a noose-bound fizzog of rictus. All those people complaining they’re in debt / unloved / hopeless: what do they fucking know?

Thursday, January 8, 2015

First off, you’d choke on the skin unless you were fantastic at chewing or had ultra-responsive salivary enzymes.

Second, not all bananas shipped from foreign climes have been thoroughly washed (because who eats the skin anyway?), so consuming the whole thing might put you at risk of coming into contact with gorilla sweat, weird beetle urine, and other potential infectants / irritants / spawners of terminal disease.

So be sure to peel the banana.

And wash your hands afterwards.

And dispose of the banana-peeling gloves carefully.*

* After you’ve peeled the banana, and not before. I know this is obvious, but I also know some of you are stupid that way and I don’t want my 2015 to be riddled with legal action shenanigans thanks to me being held responsible for the first death from Orang Mandible or Millipede Brain Rusk this side of Mozambique since 1945 and 1921 respectively.

It also goes without saying that you should erect your (now fully peeled) banana on a pole.

According to my 80s UK Government issued Citizens’ Guide To Throating (bundled as a ‘lighten the mood’ freebie with the now infamous Protect And Survive leaflet), professional throaters never use their hands.

In any case, if the purpose of the exercise is to cultivate an atmosphere of exuberant optimism and resolve (which it is — sorry I missed that out right at the start but I wanted to cut to the chase in an in media res meets zero procrastination kind of a way), it would help immensely for your arms to be flung aloft as if you were plunging to your (faux) doom on a roller coaster designed and operated by a psychopath.

Feel for its tip with your lips like a Disney elephant sucking at a bun with its trunk!

Slide those trembling lips over the tip with the zest of a lifeguard throwing a rubber ring round a drowning fat man.

Slip your tongue down the shaft, pausing to anchor taste bud onto ridge before gliding further to the fruit’s gorged base with the grace of a human/cephalopod hybrid swimming butterfly in a pool of dolphin milk.

Suck — like a black hole leading to a dimension of unparalleled paradise — till your lips kiss the unfurled skin flapping at the banana’s base, and your uvula is squeezed against the back of your throat with crotch-of-70s-flared-trousers inevitability.

Throat life!

Throat life and all its bounty!

Till your fingernails fly from your outstretched fingers!

And tiny dribbles of squeezed banana juice roll round the rim of your throat, narrowly avoiding your brachial tract or fast-tracking it up your nostrils and out into someone’s face.

When Thoreau urged one and all to “go confidently in the direction of your dreams” he was trussed to a slow-turning ferris wheel circled by 101 bananas on poles.

Monday, January 5, 2015

The last time I searched for the hero inside myself I found Peter Parker from The (now classic) Amazing Spiderman #50.

Here’s how that looked:

The lyrics to M People’s 1994 swankwank classic are inspiring, no doubt about it, and on a good day, Wolverine’s claws, The Angel’s wings and Batman’s...batty ear thingies, poke from your clothes and skin like priapic urges in a monastery.

“If only I weren’t on a crowded bus surrounded by old women and babies! The way I feel right now, I could cast off this illusory mantle of alter-egoness and bound, fly or teleport myself towards my dream horizon in the spangliest costume evah!.”

And that’s where the problems begin.

You do ascend to that horizon! You do triumph over seemingly undefeatable enemies (most of whom wear helmets and capes more ludicrously spectacular than your own)! You do bask in the adoration of a world saved from disaster!

Then you go back to normal for a while, cutting toenails, chewing the fat, ironing shirts with difficult-to-iron collars and awkwardly flibbly sticky-outy bits.

And the hero inside yourself strips down to his bra and pants, and stumbles round the idly pumped frisbee flume of your bloodstream, looking for a decent razor and maybe a toothbrush.

The hours after battling heroically with an exuberant draft or meticulous edit can be flatter than Mae West’s breasts pressed between hugging titans.

You want to bound or fly or teleport some more, but the alleyway trashcan of life demands that you stop, either because it’s 3am, your partner is threatening to kill themself, you haven’t eaten for months — or some other stupid, stupid reason.

All of which stinketh mucho yucko.

But costumes are wilful as memes, selfish genes.

And even the drabbest of vaguely horned helmets will find a way to throw itself onto the shambling figure lost in your arterial alleyways of oblivion.

So keep checking your extremities for tell-tale signs of cozziepokery.

Like Dr Doom said, “every nipple or bellend is potentially the tip of a flamboyantly gloved superhero thumb.”

Thursday, January 1, 2015

Just as the baby Alien sprang from John Hurt’s stomach, glistening with the slime of novelty, so 2015 bursts from Santa’s decaying corpse.

There’s something refreshing about New Year, a sense of manufactured impetus hungry for future sequels whose initial thrashing about the Nostromo fixtures and fittings is puppy-like in its enthusiasm for the Here and Now.

To take full advantage of the occasion, we must all be prepared to revel in Santa’s death.

He was a good man, he was a bad man, his beard finally stripped of snowy innocence in a festive facial hair morphwarp to rival Dickens’ Christmas Present ghost’s shenanigans (only backwards, regressing to the careworn shag of Hurt’s War Doctor).

I think the technical term for this is “out with the old, in with the new”.

And herein lies the crux of the New Year Miracle.

In his famous 1979 Feeley Monastery lecture, spiritual adviser to the starless The Yeged-Godi urged us to pay heed to the Buddhist tradition of ‘cyclic wankcraft’ — essentially the journey of a single sperm from tadpole-like scrotal swimmer to fertiliser of egg to child or dog or puma, and all the way back to sperm again via the wonder of cell diffusion, digestion, DNA (and a whole bunch of other biology/physiology/sciency stuff).

The point he made was that change was inevitable.

The old will always find (or be shown) the exit door (think: when did you last retweet Marlon Brando?) and the new will forever spawn, like aliens bursting from Hurts.

The only question to ask yourself, in this maelstrom of tango twixt novelty and demise, is on which side of the change do I want to be?

January 1st implores you to be change’s agent.

Complete with tricksy wristwatch from Q.

Keep watching the dial and maybe you can avoid becoming change’s servant by February 3rd...